William Fitzgerald’s New Publication: Spiritual Modalities

We are proud to announce William Fitzgerald’s (Rutgers University) newest publication through Penn State University Press, Spiritual Modalities: Rhetoric, Prayer, and Performance.

Here is a description from the press about the text:

“Spiritual Modalities shows what rhetoric has to offer the conversations about prayer—its emphasis on situatedness, with its insistence (and Burke’s insistence especially) on seeing language as inseparable from bodies, attitudes, values, contexts, and culture. William FitzGerald captures that additive quality and stands to lure scholars from other fields into rhetoric.”—Debra Hawhee, Pennsylvania State University

A bold recasting of prayer as a rhetorical art, Spiritual Modalities examines situations, strategies, and performative modes of discourse directed to divine audiences. Examining how prayer “works,” Spiritual Modalities reads prayer’s situations and strategies, its characteristic acts and attitudes, to advance an understanding of prayer as a basic expression of our rhetorical capacities for communication and communion. This ground-breaking analysis demonstrates how prayer draws on fundamental capacities to engage other beings rhetorically to argue that we are never more human than when we address the non-human.

Spiritual Modalities is notable in its aim to articulate a critical rhetoric of prayer in a secular idiom. It draws on contributions to rhetorical theory from Kenneth Burke along with a broad range of classical and contemporary perspectives on audience, address, speech acts, and modes of performance. The book also takes a multi-cultural and multi-modal approach to prayer as rhetorical performance. The texts and practices of prayer represented range across religious traditions and historical eras and include both verbal and physical modes of divine address. The book will be of interest to scholars researching religious language, Burkean approaches to discourse, practices of memory, and media studies.